Kenneth Snelson's large-scale sculptures of steel tubes and wires have gained
international recognition in exhibitions and collections worldwide. However,
Snelson's interest in the construction of matter has also produced an entirely
different line of work on a submicroscopic level: his on-going art work "Portrait
of an Atom." These lesser-known investigations into the properties of structure
led him to use digital technology years before the official advent of "the age
of digital media." His early experiments with 3D visualization and technology
have in various respects gained new relevance in the context of today's digital
arts - most notably in regard to the now much-discussed relationship between
the arts and sciences.

Snelson's artistic work has always been fueled by scientific interests, particularly
those of physics. Based upon the principle of tensegrity, a hybrid of the terms
tension and integrity, Snelson's trademark sculptural structures are concerned
with the essential forces of nature. They are investigations of the nature of
structure and the structure of nature and one of their striking qualities is
their structural purity and integrity - results of the intellectual rigor Snelson
applies to his work.

In the 20th century in particular, the exploration of the nature and principles
of space has been a major concern of art, culminating in the question of how
space can be articulated. In their seemingly limitless and weightless combinations,
Snelson's sculptures create the illusion of a defiance of gravity that expresses
a kind of irony crucial to the messages of new meda. The defiance of gravity
belies the materials of which the defier is constructed. The sculptures capture
the tension in the juxtaposition between closed and open systems. At the same
time the perfection of connection becomes an underlying motif. All of these
aspects - the openness and closure of systems, connectivity and the transcendence
of physical laws - also happen to be crucial issues in digital art today, reflected
by the myriad possibilities offered by the simple alternation of ones and zeros.

Since the 1960s, Snelson has pursued his investigation of force relationships
on an atomic level and worked on developing a portrait of the atom. Snelson's
atomic structures have taken different forms, from drawings to models built
out of various materials, and since the modeling of properties on an atomic
level ultimately requires dynamic visualization, it seems logical that he early
on used 3D graphics as a tool for visualizing his ideas about atomic structure.
In the 1980s, Snelson decided to buy the state-of-the-art computer at that time
- a Silicon Graphics 3130 with Wavefront software - and started to create 3D
versions of his atomic model, sometimes as stereoscopic atom landscapes. The
technology at the time was barely affordable and rendering the models took him
up to 15 hours.

As his large-scale tube-and-wire sculptural work, Snelson's portrait of an
atom ultimately is a force diagram in space. His atomic model originated from
his experiments with the binariness of magnetic fields: building magnetic spheres
of various sizes that reverse-rotate in a checkerboard pattern, he made the
connection between groups of magnets forming spheres, the periodic table and
the numerical patterns shells and subshells of atoms exist in. Snelson realized
that one can build rigid magnetic spheres out of 2, 5, 8, 10, 14, 18 or 32 magnetic
disks. Apart from the number 5, this sequence corresponds to that of the periodic
table. He concluded that once one has reached one of these structures in the
progression through the periodic table, one has to start a new, larger sphere
and new period.

Snelson's portrait of the atom both deviates from and combines the scientific
models of atomic structure. Modern atomic theory has its basis in the theories
of the chemist John Dalton (1803) and was further developed by other scientists,
among them Kekulé von Stradonitz, A.W. von Hofmann, and the physicist J.J. Thomson,
who discovered the electron in 1897. The first successful model of the interior
structure of an atom was proposed by Niels Bohr in 1913. Bohr described electrons
as particles that follow definite orbits and his visual model provided us with
the universally recognized logo and graphic representation of the atom.

The idea of electrons as particles was later on superseded by the understanding
that electrons have the properties of waves. The model developed by Prince Louis
Victor de Broglie (1892 -1987) depicts the spinning electron as forming a matter
wave. Absorbing light, the electron reaches a higher energy level and an additional
wave is incorporated in the larger orbit. De Broglie's wavelengths surround
the nucleus at the plane of the equator, so that his model ultimately is a flat
one. It can be understood as the bridge between the Bohr and the modern charge
cloud model that was refined in 1925 by Erwin Schrödinger who managed to incorporate
most of his predecessors' insights into a single theory. On the basis of quantum
mechanics' understanding of particles as waves, Schrödinger developed the electron
wave function, which describes the probability of finding the electron inside
the atom at a given time. Since an electron is electrically charged, the probability
of its distribution within the atom is known as charge cloud. In the charge
cloud model of the atom, dark regions indicate high probability of finding the
electron while light regions indicate low probability.

Wolfgang Pauli (1900 -1958) further developed the complexity of the charge
cloud model by introducing the exclusion principle, which assumes that no two
electrons can be in the same orbit around the nucleus at the same time. Within
the charge cloud model, this means that only two electrons can occupy the same
charge cloud at a given time, one moving clockwise and the other counterclockwise.

In Kenneth Snelson's model, we find the atom, or rather its energy surface,
represented by spherical forms in space. The electron has more orbital possibilities
than in other models: it can move equatorially as in the de Broglie model but
can also spin in a "halo" orbit; the electron circles do not necessarily surround
the nuclear equator but can inhabit small-circle halo-like rings on an electrical
shell. While charge clouds can intersect and overlap, Snelson's rings cannot.
The basic assumption of Snelson's model is that the electron's orbit can move
off-center: he presumes that all the electron has to do is maintain its wavelength
at whatever level or shell it finds itself in.

While Snelson's model of the atom hasn't made it into the official history
of atomic models, it has received interest from scientists at various points
in time. It seems natural that the concern for structure that is an underlying
narrative of Snelson's work has led him to incorporate the scientific perspective
on the subject rather than ignoring it. However, the endeavor to combine an
artistic and scientific approach to a subject is often met with suspicion in
both the artistic and scientific community.

The issues Snelson has addressed in all of his work connect to themes that
are relevant in the age of digital media and his blurring of the boundaries
between art and science may be the most prominent one of these themes. The digital
age has the potential to bridge various gaps between art and science and, at
least theoretically, to bring them closer to each other than they have ever
been. The digital world doesn't allow for clearly delineated forms of inquiry
anymore and continuously induces overlaps between arts and science. Both realms
now have to address issues surrounding representation in 3-dimensional (networked)
spaces, information and data management, issues of interfacing as well as ethical
implications of their explorations.

The assumed split between art and science to a large extent relies on a definition
of the supposedly different objectives of these two realms. While science -
according to its traditional definition - is based on validation of findings,
proof, and objectivity, art supposedly belongs into the realm of the non-scientific,
of speculation, subjectivity, sensual/emotional experience and a freedom of
expression beyond accuracy. This definition was partly self-imposed and partly
created for art and science to keep them neatly compartmentalized. However,
it deliberately seems to downplay that scientific research always starts with
hypotheses, speculation, and experimentation and that subjectivity is necessarily
a part of it.

The beginning of the 20th century was a time of revolutions in science as well
as art. Quantum mechanics, particle physics, the theory of relativity as well
as depth psychology moved science into an increasingly theoretical and abstract
realm, beyond the evidence of the senses and nature as the integral element
and ultimate object of explanation.

It has frequently been argued that these scientific developments have led to
an increasing abyss between the arts and science since the latter went off into
a realm that was predominantly theoretical and less concerned with sensual experience.
However, it can also reasonably be argued that in the beginning of the last
century, art underwent a similar revolution as science and that the respective
developments in the two realms were closely connected and to a large extent
mirrored each other. The fractured perspectives of cubism and the four-dimensionality
of relativity are just one example of this mirroring process.

In the digital age, the technologies of representation in art and science are
constantly converging. This is partly due to the fact that digital media allow
to visualize what couldn't be represented before. Many data sets are intrinsically
virtual, that is, they refer to processes that aren't visible or graspable,
be it the money market, the transferal and transmission of data via networks
or atomic structure. Both the arts and the sciences are continually in search
of visual models that allow for dynamic mapping of these processes. Science
now more and more relies on simulation in its use of 3D visualization, VR and
immersive environments. Art is exploring the same environments - sometimes using
scientific data - in an attempt to construct realities and ways of communicating.

One of the most important issues Snelson's portrait of an atom raises is ultimately
one of representation. Representing used to be primarily object-oriented - what
is represented as what is seen. The word "model" used to signify a mechanical,
palpable object; today, the term is also commonly understood as a hypothetical
or mathematical construct. As art, science has created its own language and
metaphors that are fluid constructs rather than static entities and need to
be seen in the context of issues of representation. The representation of the
atom in Bohr's model is not scientifically accurate, yet it has profoundly shaped
our idea and image of the atom - mainly due to its visual beauty and simplicity.

Kenneth Snelson's work poses the question of how scientific knowledge may be
translated into aesthetics, and whether there are possibilities for new visuals
without simple visualization. His sculptural work creates a dialogue on the
interaction between the actual and the hypothetical - which potentially is of
great benefit to both the arts and sciences. By pursuing scientific interests
with artistic methods, Snelson has been probing the nature of representation
itself and the way artistic and scientific models of representation both reflect
and structure the awareness of our culture.